


(it's still a question of) how long will this hold?

by safertohateher



Category: Orange is the New Black
Genre: Gen, Past Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 10:26:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2266272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/safertohateher/pseuds/safertohateher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Worse than the guilt, you think, is the shame of playing the victim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(it's still a question of) how long will this hold?

**Author's Note:**

> A Piper backstory I am unable to shake interwoven with Daya's moral dilemma. Possibly more to come.

You didn’t think you could feel any worse—Mendez is an asshole, but he’s not a rapist (at least not anymore than John is, a fact that threatens to empty the contents of your stomach every time it crosses your mind, morning sickness or no) and you have technically (your new least favourite word) put an innocent man in prison.

Which, as a ward of the state, you feel pretty fucking horrible about.

John isn’t helping. ‘He deserves it, Daya,’ he insists, every time he corners you in the kitchen or Spanish Harlem (you haven’t been to the tobacco shack in weeks). He’s always smiling, some vague approximation of relief, utterly blind to the hypocrisy of it all (but then you had been, too, at first, and isn’t it funny how these things go?)

You ask him to leave you alone, even though you’re itching for his touch, his kiss, his lies to be even somewhat comforting.

‘I told Caputo,’ he continues, misreading your disillusionment. ‘He wouldn’t let me take responsibility. But I tried. I tried to be who you wanted.’

You try to smile at him, conciliatory, but your mind seizes upon a thought that you trap on the back of your tongue before it can trip from it: _how relieved you must be to have failed._

Almost worse than the guilt is the shame of playing the victim. Everybody who isn’t your mother or Gloria or any of the girls that know the truth looks at you with pity, the poor little mija raped by the big bad guard. Mendez’s proclamations of love as he was escorted from Litchfield did nothing to negate this impression; most think him delusional, or a liar hoping for a reduced sentenced by claiming consent, legally viable or otherwise. The women’s sad eyes and trailing stares follow you everywhere, haunt you in the darkness alongside Mendez’s face when he saw you’d kept his card, John’s wavering smile in the face of your anger.

Chapman is the only exception. At first, you think it’s an act, an attempt at politeness bred from a WASPy upbringing steeped in denial. The two of you are alone in the library working on the newsletter, which Caputo had reapproved in Fig’s absence on the condition that they print his bullshit propaganda about Litchfield’s new-and-improved inescapability. You’re doodling, a rough sketch of Fig-the-pig (moneybags supplanted by handcuffs), at a loss for ideas for the comic. Your twelfth sigh in half as many minutes draws Chapman’s attention away from Caputo’s bio on the new security system.

‘You want to take a break?’ Chapman glances at the clock. ‘It’s nearly time for dinner anyway.’

‘I thought Healy wanted this on his desk first thing tomorrow?’

Chapman shrugs. ‘No use beating a dead horse.’

‘The horse isn’t dead, it’s just… taking a long nap.’

‘Maybe you should join it.’

You cut your eyes at her. ‘I don’t need taking care of,’ you snap, when what you mean is that you don’t deserve it. Chapman blinks, but it isn’t succeeded by the slow bleed of pity into her expression, and it makes you uneasy. A lot of people know the truth about the baby, sure, but none of them have fiancé reporters with reputations for exposing Litchfield’s various debauched undertakings.

‘Okay,’ Chapman says, returning to finalising the arrangement of the front page articles, ‘but I can give the comic a try if you keep hitting a wall. I took an art class at Smith. It was more Matisse than Alan Moore, but desperate times, right?’

You’re angry, primarily at yourself (although your mother and John and Red are pretty high up on the list) but Chapman is making it too easy to shift it onto her and her good intentions. ‘I can do it. I don’t need your help. I’m not broken.’

(Or if you are, it’s not for the reasons she thinks, and the truth is too ugly for empathy to carry).

But Chapman just looks at you. Her eyes, which are really green, you’re only now noticing, look a little too wet. They are open and honest. It hurts you to hold them. And then she says, in a carefully controlled voice a shade too quiet to achieve the casualness she is so clearly driving for, ‘It’s hard to create things when you feel destroyed yourself.’

And you didn’t think you could feel any worse, but it turns out that trading on the trauma of sexual violence to keep your pseudo-rapist baby daddy out of prison while a real victim—a pretty white girl with green eyes and money and didn’t these things never happen to these people?—lets you cry your guilty tears on her shoulder feels like having your chest cleaved in two.

Go figure.

/

You don’t want to ask, mostly because you don’t want to know, but also because you don’t think that you could handle Chapman’s tears. Instead, you apologise, run off to the bathrooms to vomit, Chapman’s understanding eyes triggering every spasm of your diaphragm.

You figure it out anyway when Vause marches into the cafeteria and pulls Chapman from her seat, seemingly torn between kissing her or beating the shit out of her, before deciding against both in favour of demanding,

‘Why?’

‘Kubra would have had you killed.’

‘I was handling it.’

‘You were sleeping with a gun.’

‘I was skipping town!’

‘He would have found you. Him and his deep, sick, twisted revenge.’ You notice Chapman’s hands trembling. ‘I couldn’t risk it.’

Vause responds with some angry, scathing remark, something along the lines of _how fucking gallant of you, Pipes,_ but you don’t hear it, and you don’t hear the catcalls and hollering when Vause slams her mouth against Chapman’s and storms out of the room. All you see is Chapman, the shadow that bloomed in her eyes when she said the name ‘Kubra’.


End file.
